If the chinese do intend to censor western media they will do it like they do everything else- slowly, well calculated and on a huge scale. Censorship the second they get a small stake in a niche company, absolutely not. Slowly increasing regulation over years or decades is more likely.

Fucking THANK YOU. When I was working in film in China a few years ago, Wanda announced that they bought AMC. I was fucking mortified. As an American that’s spent more or less my entire life in China, this was so bad. I can continue to comment on reasons why I was angry and disappointed this happened, but the point I am making was that nobody seemed to give a shit. The same goes with when Anbang bought out the Waldorf in NYC. The hotel fucking POTUS stays at. Everything has become about money and overlooking core values.

Then, conveniently after AMC sold out to Wanda, you will remember that The Interview (movie about NK) was pulled from theaters. Being the suspicious cunt that I am, my business partner’s Mom who I am quite close with, just happened to be an exec at Wanda. I asked her if they pulled it from theaters due to China’s political relationship with NK. Mind you this was a few years ago, and China wasn’t quite fed up with their shit yet, and sure enough she said yes. Imagine the USA on a large scale being censored for something like a comedy film.

I got downvoted to oblivion and called a conspiracy shill when I brought it up a few times. I don’t know. I’m just so relieved that people are paying attention now.

Furthermore, after switching industries over to finance with a focus on the China market, I want to make it clear to anyone that is hurr durring this Tencent buy: they absolutely can and intend to censor. As another Redditor stated, it is a cultural war. That is how this country sees it. Any kind of western influence in the past few years has suddenly taken a nosedive in that it’s regarded upon as a negative thing. In the past year it has become palpable. There’s been an exodus of foreigners and even westernized Chinese leaving the mainland. Myself included soon.

Things have really changed here in China. 20 years of enormous growth and tremendous amounts of forward thinking came to a screeching halt. I don’t think it will be good. I really don’t.

Edit: I’m following up about the Tencent point in case I wasn’t entirely clear. Their literal business model now is Ma Hua Teng and his executives meet in their conference room and look at companies in industries they want to expand to, and see which companies they can buy, alter, and then grow - all the while pertaining to party values. Keep in mind that all of the C level individuals including MHT himself are party members.

Contrast this to another China giant like Alibaba, where they go and start their own thing in a field they want to expand to. But that is an entirely different story. Point is that it’s in Tencent’s business model to do this. And they’ve done it INCREDIBLY well.

Edit 2: I don’t think that this stake is entirely a political move. Is it there? Yes. How much? Don’t know. I don’t work at Tencent unfortunately. However the precedent that’s been set with Chinese companies, including Tencent, holding ulterior motives that are politically charged is there. Imo, Reddit is not a good investment. This platform doesn’t monetize as easily as other social networks do. Tencent can monetize, relative to other companies like Blizzard ATVI, through most likely PR/marketing moves to push their vast basket of games on Reddit. Something like 60% of their revenue comes from gaming, and if you take a deeper look at the gaming industry as a whole, China’s gaming market, even SEA, is heavily saturated by Tencent. Tencent has something like 600,000,000 MAU on their all their games. That’s more or less the entire population of China that’s not infants, the elderly, and some stragglers. BUT, their revenue sources come purely from MAU vs western gaming companies like Blizz/ATVI which have way less MAU, but higher ARPU (average revenue per user. Think micro transactions). This makes sense because the average wage in China is way less than the western world. Therefore, Reddit is a great fit for Tencent to push marketing and PR on their countless games, that many of us wouldn’t even know belonged to Tencent without some research, to increase their revenue from a western audience.

If you’re American, you can vote for political candidates that are statesmen. Not motivated by greed or donors. (Good luck though, they are far and few).

Outside of that, unfortunately that’s the world I’ve come to realize and accept in my time doing investment. Too many things are out of the control of average folk, even well above average.

The only thing I could possibly think of that would implement a change of some sort is if everyone on the political spectrum set aside their differences and came together to make policy changes that reflected upon We The People and not We The Corporate Greed.

Absolutely agreed. You’ve stolen the words right from my mouth. I am not anti-China or anti-US. I just don’t think censorship has a place anywhere and many of the business practices in China and the US have very little integrity. It irks me to no end.

Can we also blame these companies that are happy and willing to hand over everything to China for the sake of money? Seems like the US is making it very easy for them, wave some cash in their faces and they get what they want.

Apple is a great example. They sit on a chest of well over $100 billion, and do nothing with it. They're a company that has to make money obviously, but they're going to end up killing themselves. They've basically been teaching Chinese companies how to make good electronics for the past 20 years, to the point that the quality comes close enough for the Chinese brands, and the Chinese government will simply subsidize them enough to completely price out Apple around the world. Eventually, that will come back home, and Apple will see their market share crumble (the first signs are already happening, which is why Apple had to raise the ASP of their phones and stopped reporting sales numbers for phones).

Look at the US population and the size of our economy? It’s huge but it’s reached a size that can only grow a little bit more. We’d be hard pressed to fit new catalyst that can consistently push GDP growth <4%

Now look at China’s. They are 1.3 billion people with an economy right below the us in size. But barely. They will be able to continue to grow at a clip of ~6% with ease. It’s just so much more potential.

China and India could theoretically be poised to significant outgrow the leading world economies if they figure it out. China has with their views of
Censoring and monitoring to peddle influence.

That’s why it’s so important to push the advents of American/Western Europe tech. The only way we can compete is to boost efficiency. AI, quantum, electric cars, space. Those are industries we need to be plowing resources in order to provide some competition and allow us a measure of guarantee at the table.

As long as we keep sending our blueprints to China for production, they'll never be far behind. Up until now we've been giving away our tech research away for free to the Chinese. They do not have to invest in R&D, and why should they if they can just copy it. "Close enough" with the right price tag really is close enough.

Keep in mind though that Chinese economic figures are pretty useless. The CCP has a history of pretty much making up GDP numbers and growth. Low level officials are also encouraged to inflate numbers and at the end of the day economists can make estimates but nobody really knows the size of China's economy. It's definitely massive though.

The worst part is they are an enemy of our own creation. We knew that China would be a problem since the 70's and yet our industrialists and politicians ignored that because they were so eager to get Chinese cheap labor.

Absolutely, but not only that. We have been sending them blueprints to objects and tech in general for free. All those companies who have their products built in China have been giving China a treasure chest of information, build plans, prototypes, ... As we all know, Chinese government is heavily involved in Chinese corporations and obviously uses that knowledge for its own benefit.

That's why 'cheap Chinese' knockoffs are more and more matching the quality of the initial 'premium' product.
Research done in the west is used freely in China.
That is also why China will be taking our markets by storm. We've seen cheap Chinese smartphones with an insane bang for the buck. Now they're heavily investing in electric vehicles as well to give an example. Where the West falters because of high costs, including labor costs, the Chinese pretty much have infinite funds to invest in the research of these vehicles. Volvo for example is owned by Geely which is a 'privately owned' Chinese company. We all know what 'privately owned' means in China.

And honestly, I have no problem with the Chinese PEOPLE trying to create a product and get people outside of China using it; that's just capitalism in action. The PROBLEM arises in that every single company in China is beholden to the CCP, and their interests are against every single Democratic nation in the world. If China had a Democratically-elected government that wasn't trying to infiltrate and steal from every other country, their success could be celebrated; until that happens, they're never to be trusted, in my book.

This is why I keep trying to point out that is not futile and pathetic to speak out now, right at the start, rather than five years down the line when China has a much bigger stake and people only then wake up to odd changes that start to occur on the site. Yet this wave of mockery for anyone speaking out against China's purchase is bewildering. Like there's real venom towards people who criticise China buying in to Reddit.

Mockery that you speaking out is futile.

Mockery that why speak out now and not years ago.

Mockery that mentioning Tiananmen Square is Karma whoring.

Mockery that you'll stop complaining the next day and go back to cat memes.

The top post here is an example. Outright resentment towards these anti China posts.

But mockery is a form of control used to silence people. By embarrassing and belittling you, you feel less inclined to speak out in case you become the mocked.

So here we are, China, the nation that silences the voice of freedom, is having their work done for them on Reddit. Well done reddit. Rather than speak out for the cause of freedom and human rights, you instead think it's pathetic and wish to silence those people that do so.

Either that or this is another case of external forces flooding Reddit with "anti" messages to make the worthy cause seem futile. Wouldn't be the first time.

Thank you. I know Reddit culture finds sarcasm hilarious for some reason, but I find it troubling that top comments are always a variation of "lol nothing will come of this", "nobody is surprised", and such.

These comments may not be ill intentioned, but they are harmful. They show the people doing wrong that not only we don't care, but that they are free to do as they please with no backlash. And they influence us, the people, into thinking we can't do anything about it, so we follow along.

I always downvote these comments and try to upvote the higher effort ones, but it's me against thousands.

I love South Park, but I really think it has hurt a generation of people's ability not to be cynical. Maybe they are just a symptom of the problem, but they sure did bring it to the front and normalized it.

Hi all, thank you guys so much to making us grow to the heights we are at now. We couldnt have done it without you. In this time of political diviersity we would like to take a moment and adress a new rule we are adding. As of tomorrow, no one is allowed to post about any political state in any country with over 1 billion citizens whose name starts with the letter "C" in english.

We know this is a big rule and we aren't singling any specific country out, just those that fit this highly specialized ruling. Please keep in mind this rule as you are making new posts. Any that are caught doing so shall be met with an officer within 24 hours to be send to a vacation park.

Yeah, but to be fair, reddit already started the process well before tencent acquired a stake.
The two waves of banned subreddit, the disappearing comments and threats.. Moderators are helping as well.

Redditors responded by simultaneously listing reasons why China is an awful country full of human rights abuses and censorship while giving Reddit more money via gilding posts pointing all that stuff out. You fucking rubes even give a shit or are you just following a trend?

EDIT: Since this post is gaining some steam, here's a couple LPTs: Just because you like a website doesn't mean you have to donate to them. If you like a post, just upvote it and/or comment. Quit treating gold and plat as a super upvote like how you treat the report option as a super downvote. Focus on what a post says rather than the symbols and numbers next to them.

Also half the benefits of Reddit premium given by gilding (such as ad-free browsing) can be gained for free though so many methods (browser based ad-blocker, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and 3rd party mobile apps like Reddit Is Fun that run ads so small they might as well not exist).

EDIT 2: Amiajoketoyou.jepg. I woke up to find out a post about why gilding is stupid when you hate what the site is doing and see I have almost 4 months of premium. I knew when I posted this it would attract jokers that like to guild people talking about gilding, but I had no idea there would be so many. I'm also finding out that there are people out there who get a monthly stipend of coins to spend because they were premium users on the Alien Blue app before it became the official Reddit app. Could mean that most of the gold I got, possibly most on the site, was never paid for with real money and invalidates a lot of what I said.

I made that argument as soon as they rolled out the new gold system. No need to make it pull points down (just like gold doesn’t pull points up). Just a big old badge like that telling readers “big yikes”

Makes you wonder about what? Can you spell it out for me? I am very confused by why they started hosting these contents apart from making things load slower and more unreliably while costing them a ton.

Can I just jump in and say millions of us were given years of Reddit premium for free about 14 months ago. And recently With Reddit premium we get free gold and silver and plat to give away each month. I sure as fuck would not give any money to Reddit and when my premium runs out. Oh well.

Edit: To clarify if you had the Alien Blue app before Reddit bought it you where given years of premium. Some people paid for the pro version of the app. But I didn't even do that. At some point, I either got in early enough or it was some promo, but I got the pro version for free and hense got reddit premium for free.

Long time bacon reader here myself. However for the second time since I've started my bacon reader app won't play gyfcat links. Any other gifs work fine but that site always fails I have to watch them in browser. This happened once before a few years back then they fixed it but it's broke. Again for whatever reason..

Anyone else get the feeling that Admins are starting to just gift random golds to people just to artificially increase the amount of people that will buy it because "Hur dur it was funy that one teim" ?

When reddit gold was first released, some comments would often have 10+ Gold's. (Usually the ones from Admins, shocker!)

This is where I stand on the matter, and this is where this sort of thing really upsets me. I'm more than happy to donate to a site that believes in free speech and lets me congregate and communicate with people. What I hate is the idea that apparently the money I give and the money that many other people have given isn't enough. What, do we need to give more money? Let us know! I'm sure plenty of us out there would be more than happy to let them know. For a while, I don't know if they still do, but they showed us how much gold payments had paid for the server so far. It was great!

Is Reddit a platform of free speech and communication and community? Or, is Reddit an advertising revenue to get its owners rich? I know what I thought it was. I hope it remembers.

Reddit is going the way of youtube and is willing to sacrifice free speech if it means more money. Problem is if they go to far unlike youtube which would require a huge amount of investment to start competition, reddit competitors will start to become more and more likely.

It gets more and more popular because it promotes free-speech, good content with very little advertising, initially. This creates more of a philanthropic vibe.

Then the social media site gets enough hits for big businesses to realise that they should be investing and using this space to further their own gains, the social media gets a huge investment and not for the best of reasons usually.

Users become disassociated with the platform they love, so they move elsewhere - then rinse and repeat.

Ok, so your assumption that reddit is a non-profit is wrong. If it was and we could fund it through donations and gold, then that would be great, but it's not. Reddit is a for-profit company incorporated in a capitalistic system. It will always strive to make the most revenue. Whether that means pleasing it's users or indoctrinating them with ads and sponsored content.

It's the YouTube problem. Neither reddit or YouTube are profitable operating models from the start because of the expansiveness required in keeping the lights on, so you have to keep coming up with new funding schemes to keep the lights on. The users get upset but what are they going to do? Go to a competitor? Nope, that doesn't exist because the model itself isn't profitable.

The best you'll get are pale comparisons that aren't as feature rich, stable, or popular. Any competitor that then gets the population of reddit/YouTube then gets the curse of reddit/YouTube that they now have to massively invest to keep that population and suddenly they're stuck in a non-viable business model.

Eh reddit is not nearly the same as YouTube. Most content (read:data intensive media) is hosted off site. And it's basically just a big forum here. Also isn't part of it open source? Anyone could theoretically make a new reddit for not that much money. YouTube is orders of magnitude more volume and just sheer bandwidth. This issue is transferring users.

Reddit has made a lot of investments to limit that third party hosting so that their model isn't as reliant on folks like imgur and the rest. They've poured a lot of money into localized video and image hosting and as the base grows, that cost grows with it. My guess is that infrastructure growth out paces the revenue growth (same as YouTube) and that's why they're always at funding odds.

It’s going to happen every single time. Even if Reddit goes down and a new site appears.

In this country money is over values, is over anything.

When people would rave about how Reddit is their perfect social media site that would never sell out! I always said “wait until it’s big enough and the investment offers get bigger too” I always got downvoted.

Here we are today.

Reddit founder suicide - the place is censored like hell, everything it promised not to be is being broken simply because of money.

Complacent people make a half assed effort to “stop” the problem by posting memes because it causes a short rush of endorphins from getting karma and false sense of solving a problem from the comfort of their own home while sipping coke and eating Doritos.

And last but not least, the same people complaining and calling Reddit sellouts and traitors and complaining about censorship will continue visiting the site and buying gold/silver and supporting it blindly.

I contribute to the problems but where else can you find all kind of obscure amateur porn without ads?

That shit would never happen if Aaron was still around. And these days other co-founders look around and feel probably left behind since Facebook and other social media pages make billions, so here we go quick Chinese money infusion to keep their life style... Because who gives a shit, right...? I fucking swear greed has literally no limits.

This is what I don’t get. I seriously doubt their move is to censor what people say on Reddit; the main benefit would be analyzing the data to understand how to best manipulate the group think — and then subtly use the platform to manipulate the groupthink. If anything Russia’s experiment proved the value of the investment.

More like pointing out how ridiculous it is to make facebook posts about fire awareness and posting old pictures of ruined houses while your neighbor is burning down.

If your activism ends on social media, the only thing you've effectively done is jack yourself off. Reddit is still receiving the investment, and post-investment you're all going to grovel back because you're too entrenched. It's accomplished LITERALLY nothing. Have some self-awareness. None of you really care about "tank-man" or Chinese censorship. Certainly not enough to do anything more strenuous than making threads about it.

I don't think anyone here is claiming that social media activism is all that needs to be done. You are basically saying that because a single facet cannot fully accomplish a goal, it is pointless. You could say the same thing about any form of nonviolent protest. I mean what does standing out in the street with a sign really accomplish. Well, a lot when it is a part of a wider movement.

Perhaps what people such as yourself who can see that posts on reddit alone are far from enough to accomplish much of anything should be doing is encouraging people to do more. Shaming them for the little that they have done is a surefire way to shut down any sort of willingness even if your intent is the opposite. Spreading awareness through social media is a virtually necessary part of any modern protest or movement and it often forms the catalyst for more significant action.

Also, you are painting with far to wide or a brush when you are saying that none of the people on Reddit did anything more than make a post and that none of them really care. Are some of them like that? Absolutely. A majority? Maybe. All? Absolutely not. There are all sorts of people from all over the world here and I can virtually guarantee that not everyone is purely of the couch-warrior type that you claim.

Um, excuse me, yes it is true! We saved the internet from Ajit Pai, prevented the nuclear holocaust with North Korea and now we are saving the world from China. People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because socially awkward men stand ready to post memes on their behalf on the internet. You're fucking welcome.

As a pro-gun independent voter...tell me about it. I got banned from /r/news after 6 years of good activity by a well known anti-gun mod for simply having a conversation with another Redditer about a recent event. "Banned for trolling" and when I appealed that ban they just ignored me.

I've been banned from multiple subs over the last 6 months for having a different opinion.

I've been banned from multiple subs over the last 6 months for having a different option.

Yup. Reddit is already broken. Why does there appear to be very little talk of this? Probably because it perpetually gets silenced. Sometimes when I'm posting it feels like it might without hyperbole be like >50% agenda driven shlllbots that I'm surrounded by.

I've been waiting for something less fucked up to use. I guess maybe that isn't able to exist anymore on the internet.

Lol I tried to appeal an r/news ban and they reported me to reddit and had me 72 hours banned from the site for MODERATOR HARASSMENT. It's like the only people who mod those subs are the most insecure anti confrontational people out there

it’s because admins are terrified of mods in the big accounts. They let them run the business right or wrong. I’ve said it for years. If a post reaches 100 or more upvotes it needs to be deleted by mod committee. Over 1000 it needs to be an admin deletion. Otherwise a popular story / opinion that thousands of people are discussing can be nullified by a 15 yr old kid who gets a bit power hungry. It’s broken.

Atleast lots of people learned about the horrible shit China has done, I personally never saw so many photos or videos of the Tiananmen Square Massacre or read accounts about grinding bodies up with tanks and bulldozers and burning them and hosing it into the sewers.

"let's post videos of Tienanmen Square and Winnie The Pooh! that'll show them! and let's buy gold and platinum for these posts to further support what we think we're against! we're such badasses lmaoooolol xD"

well we are far due for something better than reddit. The mod system is garbage and almost all subs are just running after it's tail going nowhere. It was a great thing for a while but we are due for something that moves forward.

Agree but whatever replaces it must build upon what's made reddit great - namely democratic comment display. There are some tweaks to be made to address some of Reddit's shortcomings and hopefully the replacement will offer some solutions. How about we list some of those things? I'll start:

I hope whatever comes later has something waaay better than democratic comment display. Voting for the best answer and having conversations based on a democratic system regularly leads to trash conversations and bad answers.

Agree and this is a common sentiment but it ignores that the democratic system is arguably what made reddit what it is in the first place. It also ignores the fact that most of the time, the system actually works quite well. What you're describing is common but not ime the what goes down the majority of the time. Almost always when it's clear that the voting system has had an unfavorable outcome in a conversation, it's because of some specific reason that can be identified by a sharp reader. If the specific issue can be identified, it can be systematically addressed. That's why I'm asking for a list. If you saw this democratic commenting system produce a "trash conversation," then describe specifically how that happened.

Most subreddits of any decent size only allow people with a certain opinion to participate. Everything turns into a circlejerk with everyone patting each other on the back and repeating the same thing over and over again.

Actual discussions where people with different points of view do not happen here. Unlike in oldschool forums and messageboards, you can do away with anyone saying something you don't like because the majority of people on reddit use the voting system as an agree/disagree marker.

The downvoting system actually encourages more people to downvote. If your comment gets below the threshold, then it "hides" it so that people know it was downvoted and so they know to go downvote it themselves after clicking the view button on it.

People are afraid to speak differently about issues because they'll get downvoted and their ego will be hurt.

It should just be like Facebook where you just upvote things. The shit stays at the bottom with 0 upvotes and downvotes and the good shit will still get upvoted.

C'mon man. They posted a bunch of pictures and whined and accomplished what exactly? This was February 2019's Kony 2012. Except even less.

That being said I did learn about r/sino because of it and I gotta say it's a weird feeling being on the other end of such rampant nationalism and vague, rude generalizations about 'my kind'. Certainly puts things into perspective.

Here's a fun excerpt from a thread about going to war with the west:

The "West" as we know it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Visigothic traditions. It is deeply rooted in the Germanic mindset of constant expansion, warfare and ethnic conquest. Nothing is ever enough for this kind of culture. Once they conquered the Western Roman Empire, they push east into Slavic lands, and south into the Easter Roman Empire. Once they took all of Europe, the pushed into the New World, Africa, and South Asia.

In traditional Chinese culture, the scholar is the first man of the state, commanding far more respect than any warrior or general. In the West, it's the complete opposite. Many of their greatest heroes and leaders weren't even literate. The only qualification for nobility was to good with a sword and lance.

Or other fun things like

China doesn't need a democracy

Like it's weird because so much of the stuff ticks the right boxes of 'here's some propaganda bro' but maybe that's in response to western propaganda. But then you look and they have perfectly normal posts outside of their r/sino posts. Shit's weird and entertaining.

Mods here are hilariously transparent in their biases and stomping out of dissent of any kind. I was a frequent reader and occasional commentator at r.conservative. A couple weeks ago I responded to a guy who said "He who controls the past controls the present, and thus the future". I said "What? Take another bong hit." Boom. Permanently banned. No explanation, no appeal. What a fucking joke this place has become.

I’m late to the thread, but let me tell you about a great alternative to top-down corporate social media and all the censorship and data harvesting that come with it

*Decentralization*

Mastodon is a Twitter alternative and (I think) the largest decentralized social media service, but there are other services in the Fediverse that can all communicate with each other: Friendica, Pleroma, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Diaspora, and others with different features.

Each community within these services is hosted on its own servers and has its own codes of conduct. No corporate meddling can take out the entire network, because each server is independent and chooses which other servers to federate with.

It’s still kind of in the early-adopter tech nerd stages, but it’s an exciting time to be involved. I (and others) joined Mastodon after the recent Tumblr policy changes, and I’m entertaining the idea of setting up my own server. More people joining = better communities and better technology.

Hilarious to me that all of the sudden Redditors are so concerned about free speech and censorship, when the entire site is basically built around censorship. Anything that makes the front page is heavily moderated and censored. Anything political obviously heavily censored. They'll leave in maybe 4 or 5 "negative" comments just as bait and then shadowban or outright ban all the other "negative" comments and users.